One of the top ten global banks is leveraging Duco as part of the strategic transformation programme of their business unit servicing both capital markets and securities services. This industry-leading division is one of the largest in the world, with 9,000 Operations workers.
The bank chose to deploy the Duco platform at an enterprise level to realise huge cost and efficiency savings as part of the project to remove around 40% of the overall cost base.
Unsuitable legacy technology causes manual work and high risk operations as data quality falls below audit standards
Senior leaders at the firm were concerned by the costs and risk within Operations. 1,300 reconciliations were processed manually via spreadsheets or macros, leading to significant errors in the data. As a result, processes failed to meet the quality standards required for the internal audit team and regulators.
The transformation programme harnesses Duco to resolve these problems and advance the firm’s six strategic objectives: control, commercialisation, colleague experience, client experience, cost and capacity.
“Duco offers a low-cost, quick to market solution to remediate systematic breaks and the large population of end-user computing.”
Unlocking enterprise-level cost-savings, efficiency and control through data automation
The firm uses Duco as a strategic reconciliation tool across capital markets and securities services (for equity derivatives, commodities, foreign exchange & regulatory reporting) and debt securities operations.
The initial project is to consolidate and automate thousands of reconciliations, eliminating manual processes, end-user computing and decommissioning their legacy system.
“Duco is the opportunity to accelerate to take the legacy system out. Duco are a great company to work with - they have good people, they have a good product.”
Empowering Operations through self-service
The firm are using Duco to increase their agility, empower Ops, innovate faster and streamline their operations.
They have reduced onboarding costs by 70% compared to their legacy system. STP has improved by 20% thanks to better match rates and allocation rules for exceptions. Time-to-market has accelerated tenfold.
“Time-to-market used to be 2-3 months and it is now more like 2-3 weeks...”
The Data Prep module has simplified the data ingestion and transformation process, removing the need for costly external work and multiple mapping files.
Removing 1,500 systemic breaks has also reduced risk. The Data and Regulatory Reporting team now deals with just 50 exceptions per day, compared to over 1,000 on the previous system. 100% of exceptions handled by the GFX team are now automatically allocated. Equities exceptions are down 75%.
At the heart of excellence
Next, the bank will use Duco to power a Centre of Excellence. Relying on Duco’s self-service capabilities, this will not only be a team that handles reconciliations, but also provide a model to spread best practices across the firm.
Doing so will empower Operations to own reconciliations without needing to rely on IT, increasing agility across the firm while freeing up resources.
The firm also intends to harness the platform’s AI capabilities to maximise straight-through-processing.